If Mormonism Is Fair Game, so Is Jeremiah Wright

A well-regarded Republican strategist at a private gathering recently warned, “And just wait until they play that Mormon card.” By “they,” he meant the Obama campaign and its complicit media cheerleaders.

Lawrence O’Donnell, only days later, gave his viewers a historical tutorial on the Mormon religion, darkly suggesting that we all should be afraid, very afraid. The Democratic governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, called Mitt Romney’s grandfather a “polygamist.”

This is actually good news for the Romney campaign.

By making Romney’s Mormonism an issue, the Obama campaign has, as trial lawyers like to say, “reopened” the issue of religion. The Romney campaign can therefore revisit the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s close relationship to him. True, Obama apparently severed ties to Wright, but Obama did so only after the very salvation of his first presidential campaign depended upon it.

Wright, Obama’s pastor for some 20 years, was described by Obama as his “spiritual advisor.” Wright married the Obamas, baptized their children and blessed their home. One of Wright’s friends is the anti-Semitic advocate of racial separatism, Minister Louis Farrakhan. “Trumpet Magazine,” published by Wright’s daughter and formerly promoted on the church’s website, once honored Farrakhan in a cover story as a man who “truly epitomized greatness.” In the article, Wright lauded Farrakhan as “one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African-American religious experience.”

There is, of course, the infamous YouTube excerpt of Wright shouting: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. … We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” And understand, Wright gave this blistering attack against America the Sunday after 9-11!

In his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama tells of how he met Wright. Obama made an appointment at Wright’s church to see the pastor. Wright was late. While waiting, Obama spoke with Wright’s assistant, a single mom whose husband had just died. She told Obama that she intended to leave the city and move to the suburbs to escape the violence. She also wanted her son to attend a better school. Her son, she said, would like to join a band, and his current school didn’t have one. His future school had a band and free uniforms.

“‘He’s always wanted to be in a band,’ she said softly.” When Obama told Wright of his assistant’s plans, Wright acknowledged that he tried to talk her out of moving. Why? Wright said that the boy “won’t have a clue about where, or who, he is.” Astonishing.

Wright said this to a biracial man, the product of a black man and a white woman? Wright said that the assistant’s son won’t know “who he is”? Didn’t Obama’s mom send a young Barack back to Hawaii to live with his white grandparents in order to get a premium education at the finest prep school in the state?

All Wright’s poor, single mother/assistant wanted was a safer neighborhood where her son would be able to join a band and wear a uniform, an opportunity not afforded at his urban school. Did Obama get up and leave after Wright outed himself as an anti-white racist who did not want the best for the son of his assistant? No. Obama joined his church.

Obama attended Wright’s “Audacity to Hope” sermon. Wright talked about war crimes and compared Sharpeville to Hiroshima. Sharpeville? In 1960, the South African apartheid government shot down unarmed protestors in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 black men, women and children. Most of the dead were shot in the back, and nearly 200 more were wounded. Wright compared a morally justifiable bombing to the apartheid South African government’s murder of innocent blacks. Obama remained a church member.

As to Romney’s polygamous grandfather, what about polygamy of Obama’s father?: “Obama’s father,” wrote The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof in 2008, “who apparently converted to Catholicism while attending a Roman Catholic school, was also polygamous in keeping with local custom, taking an informal Kenyan wife who preceded Obama’s mother but remained a consort … .”

Why is this relevant? After all, Obama has governed for three years, having shed his pastor. But when Obama instinctively sides with the black professor versus a white Cambridge cop doing his job; when Obama injects himself in the Trayvon Martin case, saying, “If I had had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”; when Obama falsely asserts that blacks and whites “receive very different sentences … for the same crime,” one can reasonably ask to what degree is Obama’s worldview colored and shaped by Jeremiah Wright — his angry, hostile anti-Semitic pastor of more than 20 years.

Larry Elder is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host. To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an “Elderado,” visit www.LarryElder.com.